The Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) is a partially NSF funded institute with a mission to discover and exploit emerging opportunities for mathematics research on problems in the other sciences, engineering and industry. We are proposing to the NIGMS that it partially fund the workshop "Mathematical Approaches for Emerging and Reemerging Infectious Diseases," that will be held May 17-21 1999, during the IMA's 1998-1999 annual program on "Mathematics in Biology." This workshop will take place in the IMA's facilities located on the Minneapolis campus of the University of Minnesota. The lead organizer is Professor Carlos Castillo-Chavez of Cornell University/Howard University and the co-organizers are Sally Blower of the University of California, San Francisco, Kenneth Cooke of Pomona College, Denise Kirschner of The University of Michigan and Pauline van den Driessche, University of Victoria, British Columbia. The workshop visitors will join a core group of 10 math biology postdocs and about 40 long-term participants who will be in residence for the full program. Participants are being chosen in such a way as to bring together communities of mathematicians and biologists who can benefit from interacting with each other but might not otherwise do so. We are also encouraging the selection of participants from industry as well as academe and at a range of stages of their careers. We are particularly eager to draw participants from underrepresented groups and from researchers at early in their careers, including those who have only recently achieved their doctorates. As such, we propose to use funds granted to expand numbers of participants from all these groups further than our current core funding will allow. The proceedings will be published as a volume in the series "IMA Volumes in Mathematics and its Applications" (Springer Verlag) and a record of the talks will be made available on the IMA website.